Sunday, October 10, 2010

Silver ingots of the autumn

Fly fishing for pike is not my only passion. Every year at the very same time when leaves start falling down, the silvery torpedoes come swimming closer the shores. Sea trouts I mean.

These are probably the most challenging fish to catch in the Finnish coastal waters. It's not that they are too picky with the lures or get scared easily. It's mostly the low density of fish compared to fishable area and the weather conditions at this time of year. In the autumn season when water temps have dropped to 10'c, sea trouts come closer to shores following their prey, namely sprat and baltic herring. Fishing starts from the very outermost islands and rocks in October and moves closer to continent during November and December as water temperatures keep dropping.

In the beginning of autumn season, large schools of silvery torpedoes can be spotted when they make their feeding assaults in the windy shores of the outer islands. After the assault, they swim back to deeper and colder water.

When water keeps cooling down, sea trouts spend more and more time in shallow shores. At some point they stay all the time in very shallow water, warming up their bodies in the latest rays of warming sunlight. Usually they lie right next to big boulders, one side pointing to the sun, another side very close to the protecting rock. At this point, sprat and baltic herring are far gone and their feeding consists mostly of tiddlers or 'three-spined sticklebacks', what ever is a correct term. During this phase, sea trouts are quite slow in their movements and they slowly start moving back to deeper, warmer water as the water temperatures in the shores have fallen to 1-3'c. Usually the shallow bays have their ice cover when these mysterious creatures leave the shores.

As someone could guess, I'm dying to at least see the first silvery missile of this autumn!!

Perhaps next week...

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